First ITV Evening News Gains 7.2m Viewers
On Monday evening this week ITV unveiled its new evening schedule replacing over 30 years of the News at Ten. According to unofficial overnight figures, the new ITV Evening News, at 6:30pm, slightly outperformed the previous Monday’s edition of News at Ten. The first, brightly-coloured ITV Evening News had an audience figure of 7.2 million, compared to 6.9 million for last Monday’s News at Ten. However, it is likely that the curiosity of viewers will drive audiences up for the first week or so. Previously, ITV’s Early Evening News, at 5:40pm, drew in around 4.5 million viewers.
Across the evening, the rest of the peaktime schedule ITV programmes also recorded slight weekly increases in their respective timeslots. New programmes such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Cop Shop had viewing figures of 12.0 and 10.1 million respectively, compared to 6.0 and 9.7 million for Undercover Customs and Carol Vorderman’s Better Homes which featured in the same 8 to 9pm timeslots last week.
The uninterrupted drama and film slot at 9pm featured Kavanagh QC which gained an impressive 46% (10.3 million) share of viewing, meeting ITV’s objective of growing peak time audiences with drama and films between nine and eleven. ITV claims a 48% share of viewing across the whole of the Monday evening; the Network’s target for this year is to achieve an average 39% of peaktime viewing.
The ITV Nightly News, at 11pm, was watched by 3.1 million viewers, which is roughly the same for the various different regional programmes shown at 11 o’clock last Monday. The News At Ten averaged around 5.8 million viewers.
ITV’s evening reshuffle has had a knock-on effect with other news broadcasters. Channel 5 has announced that next week it will move the 5 News bulletin forward from 7pm to 6pm and give it something of a makeover; Sky News is flagging its Sky News at Ten programme as a significant ‘appointment-to-view’ bulletin in the absence of ITV’s News At Ten.
5 News is currently drawing in just over 400,000 viewers in its current 7pm slot, according to consolidated BARB data from Monday 22 February. From next Monday the bulletin will run alongside the BBC’s Six O’Clock News which gained 6.3 million viewers on 22 February and 6.5 million on Monday this week. The Nine O’Clock News on BBC1 receives fewer viewers than the early evening programme with 4.7 million in the latest BARB audience data. The hour-long Channel 4 News only draws in 800,000 viewers across the whole country.
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